1. What I'm about to write is simply true and I'm fine with it -- in fact, there's nothing I can do about it.
For year upon year upon year, especially after I graduated from Whitworth fifty year ago, I lived my life involved in a college, a community college, and a university until I taught one last writing course in 2014. My life was largely shaped and defined by the world of higher education.
I enjoyed these years immensely -- I enjoyed reading and learning, enjoyed yakkin' with fellow students and fellow instructors. While, yes, I experienced disappointment by not achieving all I thought I wanted to, even in my failures, I came away from my studies having thought more deeply about big questions that matter. Most important, I always enjoyed working with students in the classroom and in conferences with them individually.
One thing that did not emerge from those approximately thirty-five years of making a living doing what I loved was a bunch of stories I could regale friends with at The Lounge or at parties and reunions these days in Kellogg.
This afternoon, Ed and I got together at The Lounge for a beer and he told me the story of getting his brakes fixed in Boise on a great trip he and Nancy and the Derbyshires took to enjoy Idaho waterfalls earlier this week. Later he told a series of five or six (or more?) stories about his friend in the logging world, Kingfish. The stories involved boats, a trailer, a forged medical card, and more. They were all fun to listen to and funny. They gave Debbie and me a vivid picture of what a character Kingfish was, and reinforced what I knew to be true from past stories: Ed thought the world of Kingfish.
Ed isn't alone in having stories to tell about working in the woods, adventures with vehicles, snowmobile outings, hauling rock, asphalt, and other materials, being friends with colorful guys, and more. These stories abound at The Lounge, at the Elks, and in other social settings.
Other friends of mine have hilarious stories to tell about wild days 45 to 50 years ago of doing crazy stuff on road trips, at music festivals, in canoes on local rivers, at Quinn's Resort, and elsewhere.
2. While friends in Kellogg were doing memorable things that make for gripping and hilarious tales to tell, I was studying.
I worked for a school year on Whitworth's Chaplain's Office staff.
I taught writing. And literature. And other subjects. I wrote stuff. I presented papers on occasion at conferences.
I got involved in theater.
I went to jam band, Grateful Dead, folk, jazz, and other live music concerts and behaved myself -- no stories there!
I joined Debbie's family and became a stepfather.
And even though I had been married twice before, I don't have any stories to tell -- no "bitch from hell" tales, no complaints about my ex-wives, or anything else that would grab people's interest at The Lounge or at other gatherings.
Nothing to make people laugh.
The things I do now aren't very story worthy either: book club at Auntie's Bookstore, symphony concerts in Spokane, a successful kidney transplant that's had little drama, going to hear writers talk about their books in Spokane, reading all the books on Leah Sottile's book list a few years ago, enjoying the Northwest Museum of Art and Culture in Spokane, lectures in Spokane, taking care of Copper, and so on.
And that's no problem.
My friends who have great tales to tell give me the pleasure of not only laughing, but of vicariously experiencing work, jobs, and crazy escapades I never did myself and colorful North Idahoans I never knew.
I am invigorated by the pleasures in my life and I'm accustomed to experiencing and enjoying them within myself, with Debbie, and at family dinner.
Once in a while I'll enter into conversation with someone at a concert in Spokane, like when a first violinist for the Spokane Symphony and I fell into great conversation about music and movies when we had seats next to each other at the Gonzaga Symphony back in February.
I'm also learning about how different people read and what their thoughts are about matters related to science and nature in the book club we recently joined.
It's all good.
3. I walked into The Lounge today knowing that Cas and I would have a lot of fun reviewing the past few weeks of action in our fantasy baseball leagues. I also knew that I had questions for Ed about his trip to the waterfalls and the car trouble I'd heard he'd had on this trip and I had questions about when his procedure on Tuesday was happening and whether he needed a ride that morning to Post Falls. (He doesn't. Nancy will take him over.)
My day, however, had been enjoyable, but unusual, not a day that would spark fun conversation in The Lounge.
Today I read further into the book The Mosquito.
In many ways, this is a world history book that brings to light the tremendous impact the mosquito had on what we think of as human events.
Today I read more about the colonizing of the New World and how much infestations of mosquitos and the malaria they carried and fatally infected mammoth numbers of people with shaped, for one thing, economic development in the New World.
Europeans had not developed any immunity to the diseases mosquitoes carried.
Africans, who had lived for generations in mosquito infested areas had developed immunity.
Therefore, the African slave market became essential to the growing of plantation crops like sugar cane and tobacco because while Europeans who were forced into planation labor succumbed to malaria and yellow fever, the slaves from Africa did not.
This is another of this book's many examples of how the mosquito and its impact shaped a major development of world history.
Developing immunity to malaria was known as seasoning and over time and generations, European settlers in the emerging thirteen colonies began to develop immunity, to become seasoned.
But what about soldiers who came from Great Britain to defend the interests of the king in these colonies? They were not seasoned and, in the book's next chapter, I'll learn more about the role of the mosquito in the American Revolution.
(The paragraphs I just wrote about this book might be rough with some inaccuracies. I'm writing from memory after a single reading, but I am confident that the gist of what I wrote is pretty much right on. If I need to make corrections, I'll make them in future posts.)
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